


Bury Your Mistakes

by Corycides



Series: 100 Fics in 100 Days [49]
Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-24
Updated: 2013-03-24
Packaged: 2017-12-06 07:01:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/732764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corycides/pseuds/Corycides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maggie Foster's two great passions in life were medicine and her children. Ben's family gave her the echo of one, but what if she'd gone left instead of right and ran into a militia encampment instead?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bury Your Mistakes

They had so many injured they'd run out of cots, overflowing onto the floor. Men lay in puddles of blood, holding their guts in their hands, and the stink of infection and soiled bedding was like a slap when you walked into the tent. It looked like hell – or a casualty after a pile-up on the motorway.

Two hours ago Maggie had been enjoying the morning as she looked for somewhere scenic to die. Now she straightened her back and shed her jacket, shoving her shirt sleeves up over her forearms. After spending two years as a junior doctor, working through exhaustion, depression, hangovers and an unplanned pregnancy, self-abnegation was practically a pavlovian response to the sight of blood.

She grabbed a passing soldier's sleeve. 'Who's in charge?'

He stared at her with dull, shocky looking eyes. 'General Matheson?' he said. 'Or Monroe.'

'In here,' Maggie said, lowering her expectations. 'Who's the doctor?'

'Dr. Vidal,' he said. 'He's gone to get more medication.'

Maggie did hesitate for a second, but she was planning to kill herself so what did she care if she made a good impression. If Dr Vidal didn't want her help he could tell her when he got his ass back in here to do his job.

'Get me hot water and spirits,' she said briskly. 'And set up a goddamn triage, we don't need to be splinting a broken finger when someone's bleeding out. If they aren't going to die without treatment, get them out of here and we'll deal with them later.'

Her new minion looked pathetically grateful to have someone to tell him what to do. 'Yes, ma'am,' he said. 'I'll do that now.'

He took off, harrying other aimless looking soldiers into motion. Maggie hunted through her pockets for a hair tie, twisting her hair back from her face in a clubbed ponytail, and got to work sorting who was waiting for treatment from who was waiting to die. 

There were too many of the latter, but without a fully equipped surgery Maggie's options were limited. She let herself be bitter for a couple of seconds, then stuffed the 'what if' scenarios back into their box. There were bones to set and wounds to stitch and slippery loops of guts to stuff back into cavities while blood oozed slick and slippery between her fingers. 

Weird thing about blood, she never got used to the smell of it. It just got more intense, like hot pennies and salt and rust. 

She used the vodka to sterilise her needles and knives, disinfect wounds and pour down screaming men's throats as the best painkiller they could manage. It didn't work that well. Maggie had to have two men hold down the swearing, flailing, delirious captain with a festering wound in his hip. He wasn't violent, just thought she was 'very, very pretty' and he should probably have his pants on.

'Why don't we just pretend we've already had dinner,' she suggested, leaning her elbow on his thigh. The cat-gut tugged at his skin as she dragged it through and tied it off. 'And it went really well.'

One the nurse-stand-in's laughed and then froze, face falling as he stared over Maggie's shoulder. She didn't around, looping another stitch over the knobbly poke of the patient's hipbone.

'Vidal?' she asked and got a nod in answer.

Great. Maggie finished the stitch quickly and straightened up, her back aching in protest. The skin was divoted where she'd had to cut out rotted tissue, but the stink had gone off it. That was sometimes a good sign.

'Who the hell are you?' an angry voice demanded.

Maggie tossed the needle into the used basin with the others to get cleaned and turned around, wiping bloody hands on her shirt-tails, to face Vidal. He was a lanky bloke with stooped shoulders and hair that looked like it was trying to get away from his beard. There were stains on his grubby white coat – some of it blood.

Maggie had met good doctors who looked worse but most of them hadn't pupils like pissholes in the snow.

'You're wasted' she said flatly.

He smirked. 'What you going to do? Report me to the AMA? What the fuck do you think you're doing, coming in here and-'

'Doing your job?' Maggie snapped, putting her hands on her hips and pulling herself up. She was short and pretty and a head full of blonde ringlets never got anyone taken seriously. So she was used to fronting down ass holes. The trick was to attack, not defend. 'For the last-'

She hesitated, trying to tot up patients. 

'Four hours,' someone volunteered.

No wonder her back was sore. 'Four hours. So I'm not crawling to you, Dr Vidal. Either wind your neck in, or fuck off. Unless you want to try your hand at a partial splenectomy and then decide whether something with a bowel resection could survive our delightful situation, or if its just a pointless invasive procedure? In your current condition.'

He glanced around, going a sickly colour under the the slick of sour sweat on his skin, and wiped his hand over his running nose. 'You can't talk to me like that. I have friends.'

'You amaze me.'

It took him a second to process that. He laughed nastily, peeling his lips back from his teeth, and jabbed his finger in her face. 'You'll regret that.'

Maggie laughed at him, bitterly and with absolute no humour in it. 'Trust me, if I do it'll be at the bottom of a very long list.'

'It'll be the last thing you ever get to regret.'

'Promises, promises.'

He left. She stayed. It wasn't Harley Street and her kids were probably still dead, but her patients needed her and that was reason enough to crawl out of bed in the morning. Reason enough to leave the lid screwed tight on the jar of poisoned whiskey she kept in her pack – for now.


End file.
